Re:Will this result in lower prices? (Score 1)

Your analogies do not really work and though I do agree with your last point of "the people who develop it see dollar signs", but that type of over pricing or 'premium' pricing for a new service/type of product should only last until competitors get moving and the so-called 'free market' brings the price down to a balance of cost vs desired profit, where the profit takes the most hit the more competition there is. The problem here is that digital books are not new and the cost to produce them has (mostly) totally different dependencies than a paper book. This means the cost factor of 'cost + profit' is not comparable to a paper book and instead what we see here is there is no real reflection of what the real cost is on an ebook because the people setting the prices no longer have too much of a cost. Sure there is still all the work that needs to be done to prepare a book and get it in its final format, but after that -> Replication, Advertising, Distribution, when in reference to ebooks is very low cost, advertising taking up the most if its done aggressively, but even then, when only considering electronic advertising over the internet, its not too much. The middle man that used to take care of the physical replication, distribution, and advertisement surrounding a polished product are finding their business models continually eroded by the continually increasing ability of information to get to anyone anywhere for very little to no cost at all. This leads to new electronic media not being subject to the 'free market' because the first and largest players are usually these old companies that want to maintain price points that not only help to justify their existence, but allow them to stay so large of a company... otherwise they would have to cut profits and realize they need 1/10th the staff to satisfy electronic products and the barrier to entry for distributing those products is also significantly lower than what it was for the physical versions of the equivalent product. Bottom line is emedia prices do not reflect real cost and competition, whether you attribute this to monopolies, price fixing, corporations buying out government, you get the same result and its all for the same reasons... They want to get their $$ and get out before the fall, so they will hold up the walls of their money making houses as long as possible.